Samsung Blu-ray players bricked because of an XML config file

"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

I worked for a company that used ACR to put interactive ads on your TV when the ad that it went with came on.

I pressed the meta data company manager we were working with about how they could make such accurate predictions about who was viewing based off just zip code and the content and he replied with "you would be amazed at what people will tell you about themselves for 5$ off netflix".

My productivity dropped and I had a hard time coming into work after that. (This was around the Snowden era).

LG got busted shortly after for not actually stopping the screen grabbing once a second and uploading it to a server even if you turned the option off in the UK. Not surprised.

Unfortunately piracy is often a good answer to this type of issue. If your smart TV is not connected to the internet, or you're not browsing on a licensed platform riddled with DRM and tracking agents, there's no chance of that data leaving your house.

Please tell me there is a blacklist published somewhere that allows me to avoid ever purchasing a device which includes ACR?

How do you think manufactures can afford to sell these large screens at such cheap prices. They continue to make money off of you long after the initial sale. I'm surprised they just don't give them away (except it would probably raise too many questions).

Your digital cable boxes have been doing this for even longer.

Vote with your wallet. Don't buy these internet devices.

All it takes is for a visiting family member or friend who wants to watch Netflix while you're in another room/asleep/etc to click okay.

If it's developed with the assumption that they can deliver rolling software updates, the software it ships with might be unusably buggy.

> you can still buy these blu-ray players and not connect them to the internet.

Unfortunately this is only a temporary solution IMO. Within the next decade I think you'll see these smart devices shipping with built in connectivity that's difficult or impossible to disable, especially if Starlink or other satellite based services really take off.

This is the whole point of the GDPR.

I wouldn’t be surprised. I recently bought a low end android to use as a balloon tracker (which I didn’t realize was illegal until later) and had to wait around 10-20 minutes after connecting it to WiFi While it downloaded ~15 apps (some of which kept launching background services and crashing the phone because it would run out of memory.)

I used to think consumer PCs were bad but holy cow, the way android enables malware out of the box is insane! And in the name of protecting the user from malware they have no tools to deal with it.

I just hope we have a clean option like Pinephone with flagship quality hardware soon.

Firmware updates are good. They can patch security issues and they can improve different aspects of the device. The security being the best plus obviously.

The point is that there are no "security issues" in a dumb media player like the DVD player I have. Suppose an "attacker" (and that is stretching the definition a lot...) can create a disc that can overflow a buffer somewhere and crash the player or cause it to do something "interesting", and I have been somehow tricked into attempting to play this disc --- so what? It's not connected to the Internet, the firmware is read-only, there's literally nothing of value to attack. I'll just eject the disc (manually if necessary) and not play it again.

Instead this stupid "update culture" has created horribly buggy software that's barely functional "because we can always change it", and now we somehow need an Internet-connected media player,along with all the downsides --- including security --- that brings, just so they can (try to) silently attempt to fix some bugs that should never have gotten out in the first place? My experience tells me that they will fix one thing and break something else in the process, so there's overall no real improvement.

> Firmware updates are good. They [[can]] patch security issues and they can improve different aspects of the device.

Emphasis mine - updates also remove features and introduce security issues. It's not cut-and-dry "updates are good"

I am pretty sure my Samsung fridge update removed 3 of the limited ~12 or so apps it had in the first place.

What security updates would you foresee being necessary for a traditional BluRay player? Perhaps I'm not being creative enough, but I can't think of what a hacker would accomplish.

Other than allowing the player to read pirated BluRays, I guess, but that's not the user's problem.

Firmware updates can be good, but only the user with physical access should be able to install a firmware update. An example of how this might be done may be: There is a ROM firmware (always read-only) and EEPROM firmware (read-only except during firmware upgrade operations); the ROM firmware only checks a switch (which is a physical hardware switch can be set only by the user) and if set, will load the data on the DVD (or CD or CompactFlash or whatever other media it uses, but specifically not internet) as a firmware upgrade into the EEPROM; if the switch is not set, then the EEPROM is read-only and nothing can upgrade it, not even a custom firmware. (The user could also physically open it up and replace the EEPROM chip themself, if wanted, but this would normally be unnecessary.)

I can’t vouch for Samsung but Vizio have said in the past that they make very little profit off their TVs and this is offset by data that is collected from usage.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190114/08084341384/vizio...

Now I’d imagine that Samsung are making a hefty profit on the 75” 4K all singing sets (and still spying on you) but the cheaper ones seem to be priced so there isn’t much profit.

>I think that's the only reasonable thing to do.

But that'd also mean you need double the flash capacity, which drives up the BOM cost.

Companies seem to care more about preventing users from rolling back firmware than they do about releasing firmware that works. I've had more than one device wrecked because it happened to be out of warranty when I installed a firmware update that ruined something important.

As the owner of the device, I couldn’t care less if reverting to earlier firmware has been exploited. Are device manufacturers making more money from customers or studios?

The one issue I can see with this if the original firmware has an outdated TLS trust store, reverting to the original firmware might make it impossible to update it via normal means. Whether or not this is good or bad is an exercise left up to the reader.

Just a guess, but I would assume the term factory reset referred to clearing user settings before devices commonly had firmware update capabilities. So the legacy name should not be used to imply how the function should work in relation to firmware downgrade.

>Samsung TV after a firmware update injected advertising into the UI.

Wouldn't Samsung and the rest have stopped this if people just returned the TV?

That's how factory reset works on Android — it simply erases the entire /data partition, which is the only one normally mounted read-write. Recovery might subsequently initialize an empty file system there, but bootloader certainly does not. (you're usually able to do a wipe from both)

The OS itself then initializes it all from scratch on the first boot.

If they included a factory reset, a good one besides being accessible early in the boot process, would erase and restore the filesystem on the flash chip to how it originally shipped. So that policy file will either be erased or a safe default.

Then you just keep it offline until Samsung fixes the file on their server so you don't have to reset it again. They fixed it a few days later so it is safe now, so even old firmware should be safe to go online.

It would have been possible if it was done this way in the first place.

Thus, the discussion on how factory resets could/should work in consumer electronics...

So long as Apple chooses to make that version available for download.

That's a pretty horrid way. It used to be a time where you could just run a recovery partition to reinstall your operating system outside of re partitioning your hard drive.

Better write a firmware to avoid this problem i have written in the past firmware for devices that don't affect the user experience including CA's, server domain or ip and other parts that don't require a full firmware update, better to "waste" development time thinking of all future problems that are out or your hand than bother the final users IMO. As a developer you should think every problem you could face or you aren't using the best practices of software development.

Don't know if they still do it in the USA, but about a decade ago Sony XBR TVs were able to OTA update from local PBS stations.

I don't know how useful that was. Most people hook up TVs to cable boxes.

I never hooked up my Sony to an antenna for exactly that reason. There were reports of people being unsatisfied with firmware updates. E.g. the motion interpolation algorithm changed.

This is still used for set-top boxes, at least in Belgium. It happens in the background now, but up until a few years ago when you first got one you'd only see the firmware downloader for an hour or two, with this block diagram where you could follow along: https://i.imgur.com/hh7eWZr.jpg

The worst part about that was if your signal quality wasn't great. You'd see blocks fail, and it'd take ages for them to come up again.

The boxes now ship with usable firmware preloaded, and will update in the background in the first few days usually.

Is there anywhere I can read more about the technical details behind this? It sounds pretty interesting.

I searched for "DVB firmware", but didn't find much.

ISDB-T has similar system and some Toshiba DVRs at some point had similar mass bootloop I remember

Then return it and buy one that doesn't.

Please do name and shame.

No. This is actually nonsense.

Nobody has read the Eula. Nobody has knowingly and willingly agreed to those terms (if they exist). No vendor has expected those terms to be read (if they even exist). No vendor has explained those terms to a customer.

There is a contract for exchange of ownership. You can't actually break that contract with unconscinable means such as fine print that nobody reads nor is expected to read nor has had explained.

Read a EULA if you like but it will do absolutely nothing for you nor will it alter the law and the application of the law. Maybe you'll enjoy the read though?

It is an item, purchased in a shop in exchange for money. There's rather a lot of established law about that.

Yes, you can create a mess in any language. However, a lot of languages protect you against a lot of potential mistakes and also give you means of safely recovering from errors. The XML parser might not be better when written in another language, but if it is called from within an error handler, the calling program could recover from the error.

In this case the XML file parsed fine, but the contents (specifically an empty element that the firmware expected to be populated) caused a crash.

Impossible is a big word :). But while a C or C++ program tends to crash in the presence of an error, like with a segfault, a lot of languages just throw an error which you can catch. So you could proceed with the default values, if the file cannot be read correctly.

if !parse(config) then reboot. Please, for the love of God.

But that is the point I was trying to make. No language can save you from logic errors, but a lot of languages let you recover from errors in functions. The simplest way is exception handling in Java like try { parse(xmlFile) } catch ( ... ) {.... } There is no reason the device should get in an undefined state if parsing that file fails or even completely crash.

Tizen is not a bad system by itself. For example, all Samsung watches run it, and they're the best wearables after iwatch.